Meltdown and Spectre Vulnerabilities: On it.

This week a web vulnerability was discovered that impacts virtually every processor manufactured since 1995. The vulnerability is being referred to as “Meltdown” and “Spectre”. Of course, we want you to know that we’ve got you covered. Most of our servers run a variant of the RedHat Linux operating system which released patches for the […]


How about an onslaught of 1.5 million unexpected visitors over July 4th weekend? OK!

The Friday before the 4th of July weekend we got word that a story on our client’s site, SammichesPsychMeds.com was struggling to handle a sudden traffic surge. We have hosted Sammiches & Psych Meds, a parenting, humor, and lifestyle website for a couple of years, which generally gets between 5,000 and 20,000 visits per day. Prior […]


[nginx/php-fpm] curl: (56) SSLRead() return error -9806: how we fixed it

tl;dr: Back up /etc/nginx, uninstall nginx, install the latest version of nginx, restore your /etc/nginx backup. Recently our own site was experiencing SSL connection issues. We first noticed it in Safari when connecting to wavemotiondigital.com and another site we host on the same server, both using SSLs. Oddly enough, another site hosted on the same […]


Use rsync & WP-CLI to painlessly move a WordPress site without plugins

Moving a WordPress site from one domain to another has always been a pain, since WordPress stores hashed information based on the length of the domain name in the database. Not being bound to a single domain name is one of the things that Drupal and Joomla get right and makes it easy for developers […]


27 reasons to choose WordPress over SquareSpace (spoiler: they can legally steal your content)

The fine folks at WPMU have put together an exhaustive list comprising 27 Reasons Why WordPress Crushes SquareSpace Every Time. Now, we may be a little biased because we develop for WordPress, and list is geared toward developers, but site owners and content publishers should read this as well. We are not afraid to admit this: if SquareSpace fits […]


SononaCare, PHP7, CentOS 7, Free SSLs, Piwik and more!

Today we dropped quite a few announcements for our customers. In this blog post we will break down each point individually and go a bit more in-depth on the topics covered. SononaCare We previously performed maintenance and updates to client sites as a courtesy to our customers. The update process, however, has become complex requiring constant attention […]




WordPress 4.x random crashes on nginx/PHP-FPM with SSH2

Hat tip to the Ubuntu bugs mailing list for pointing us in the right direction in solving this problem. Like any good WordPress host we are using SSH keys to provide secure FTP communications for installing/updating our WordPress sites.  Recently we noticed a perplexing issue where WordPress 4.x would crash when accessing the Settings screen or trying to delete a plugin. […]